Why Him?: This Year’s Cringe-iest Christmas Comedy

Bryan Cranston and James Franco liven up a middling Meet the Parents knockoff.

Everything you need to know about Why Him?—including whether or not you’ll like it—can probably be gleaned from the filmography of writer/director John Hamburg, who co-wrote Meet the Parents, Meet the Fockers, and Little Fockers. More than 15 years after its release, Meet the Parents remains the king of the humiliation comedy—a genre that strings together a broad, no-frills plot in an effort to squeeze in as many cringe-inducing embarrassments for the protagonist as you can possibly fit into two hours.

Why Him? is best understood as a variation on the Meet the Parents theme. This time, we’re invited to sympathize not with the wannabe son-in-law, but with the would-be father-in-law, struggling to accept his daughter’s daffy new boyfriend. Bryan Cranston stars as that dad: Ned, the owner of a flagging midwestern printing company who is forced to spend a supremely awkward, long weekend with Laird (James Franco), his daughter Stephanie’s eccentric millionaire boyfriend.

The primary innovation of Why Him? is bringing the already low stakes of this scenario all the way to the floor. Ned is grumpy and tightly wound but essentially likable; Laird is kind of doofy but essentially likable. And Laird is so desperately eager to prove himself worthy of Stephanie that he finds crazy, cartoonish ways to demonstrate his affection—from getting the entire family’s Christmas portrait tattooed on his back to having shiny regulation bowling lanes built just for Ned, an enthusiast—so the conflict at the center of the movie is less "two dudes going head-to-head" and more "one dude desperately trying to win over the other dude."

The title of Why Him? offers an easy gag for lazy reviewers to embrace: Why did actors as talented as Cranston and Franco decide to star in this broad, kind of lazy, essentially disposable holiday comedy? But while the script often lets them down, both leading men end up bringing a lot to the table. There was a time when audiences were skeptical the goofy dad from Malcolm in the Middle could play a meth-dealing badass like Walter White. Now that Breaking Bad is over, audiences might need the reminder that Cranston excels at slapstick. And Why Him? relies heavily (and mostly successfully) on Franco’s puppy-dog charm to balance out Laird’s sleazier, more ludicrous qualities.

But the relatively meaty roles for Cranston and Franco leave the rest of the overqualified cast on the margins of the story. As Ned’s wife, Barb, Megan Mullally gets one good scene, stoned and horny after letting loose at Laird’s wild holiday party. Keegan-Michael Key is stuck playing Laird’s weird friend/guru/all-purpose sidekick, repeatedly popping up in a gag the movie openly acknowledges is stolen from The Pink Panther. Most of all, Zoey Deutch—who broke out earlier this year with Everybody Wants Some!!—is totally wasted as Stephanie. The movie makes a late and unconvincing stab at giving her something to do, when Stephanie confronts her father and her boyfriend about their insistence on fighting over her without actually considering her feelings, but that doesn’t exactly erase the previous 90-odd minutes that kept her on the sidelines.

There was a time when audiences were skeptical the goofy dad from Malcolm in the Middle could play a meth-dealing badass. Now audiences might need the reminder that Cranston excels at slapstick.

But your average humiliation comedy isn’t built around characters; it’s built, like an action movie, around a series of set pieces, substituting farts for explosions. Laird’s apparently unlimited financial resources give Why Him? the excuse to engineer a number of elaborate scenarios, ranging from pretty funny to pretty unpleasant. In a movie like this, what makes a gag funny or unfunny? I think, in the end, it comes down to the line between awkwardness and pain, and Why Him? lands on both sides over the course of its runtime. When Ned ends up trapped on a super-fancy toilet because he can’t figure out how to use a bidet, his confusion and embarrassment are pretty entertaining. But when Ned ends up trapped under a desk while Laird and Stephanie have sex up on top of it, Ned’s very understandable distress is uncomfortable and weird.

And it’s also one of many, many moments that highlight the weird, contrived artificiality of this genre. Why doesn’t Ned just come out and excuse himself when he realizes what’s happening? Would Laird, however eager to please Stephanie’s family, really get a tattoo of their Christmas card, or talk about how sexy her mom looks, or lustily make out with Stephanie at a dinner table with her family? The eagerness to craft outlandish scenarios requires such crazy contortions that no one ends up feeling like a human being, which makes it that much harder to relate to comedy grounded in real human emotions like shock and embarrassment and shame.

But for audiences predisposed to this kind of thing, outlandishness can be a virtue in itself. And if you want to see a movie where a urine-soaked teenager gets a dead moose’s ball sack stuck to his face this Christmas…well, I’m pretty sure this is your only option. Though I haven’t seen Collateral Beauty yet.

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